‘I should like to write a very subtle work on the proper writing of lives. What it is that you can write – and what writing is. It comes over me that I know nothing of the art’, Virginia Stephen confided in her brother-in-law, Clive Bell, in 1908 (Letters i, 325). Many years later she would fulfil her ambition, writing subtle essays on ‘The New Biography’ (1927) and ‘The Art of Biography’ (1940), but her earliest writings are preoccupied with the problems posed by ‘the proper writing of lives’, exploring them through her writing practice and her comments on its possibilities and constraints. Biography could be seen as an exemplary form in combining history and imagination, fact and fantasy, constraint and freedom, but at the same time she did not subscribe to its rationale, indeed its exemplary nature in that other sense of holding up moral examples. From an early stage, she was committed to extending its range and increasing its flexibility, to writing against it as well as within it, as she would later do with fiction. In her second novel, Night and Day, fiction and biography are used to mirror one another, but, although she completed her novel, the biography that is being written within the book remains unfinished.

It is scarcely surprising that the young Virginia Stephen associated the possibilities of (and constraints upon) writing with the writing of biography, given her status as ‘Daughter of the DNB’. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, had gained his knighthood primarily for editing the Dictionary of National Biography. Not only in the household in which she grew up but in the wider family group, biography was accorded high status as a literary form, and widely practised: ‘when one of them dies the chances are that another of them writes his biography’ (ND, 27).